Heraflux Technologies Blog

Keeping you informed about trends and news around the convergence of data, cloud, and infrastructure

System administrators of the world, if a VM experiences a problem that takes down business-critical application, your job is to get minimize the impact to the business. You are caught in a difficult decision.

Do you repair the VM as quickly as possible, but possibly lose traces of what went wrong. In doing so, that loss of evidence might mean that this outage returns at a future point in time.

…or…

Do you prolong the outage and continue to impact to the business to investigate and get to the root cause of what actually happened so that it does not happen again?

The business almost always pushes you to perform the former, which puts you in a bad position if the VM issue returns.

Now you can do both.

For those of you on VMware vSphere platforms, the latest revision of VMware’s PowerCLI PowerShell extensions contain a little publicized feature that allows you to capture the production server’s error state and preserve it for later investigation so that you can repair the VM as fast as possible to minimize the impact to the business.

Heraflux is proud to announce a new ebook as part of our joint partnership with Pure Storage! This ebook, entitled Overcoming SQL Server Storage Challenges, discusses the current state of infrastructure technologies and how it interacts and impacts the performance of Microsoft’s flagship database engine SQL Server. Arguably, storage has historically been the slowest part of the infrastructure stack underneath the database, so much so that the core database engine makes some assumptions that it will always be the case. Modern CPUs, memory, and even the network are much less a bottleneck than administrators commonly realize. Even modern SQL Server in-memory features, such as in-memory OLTP and columnstore indexes, are heavily dependent on the performance of the storage underneath them.

One of the challenges with any SQL Server business continuity strategy is backing up your databases and logs on a frequent basis. With Windows, we’ve known how to accomplish this for years. But, with SQL Server on Linux, you can accomplish the same task with just a few different twists. It is similar to mounting a network share as a new driver letter in Windows. Let’s explore how to back up your databases to a network share with Linux!